New cover of Boston Magazine honours the resilience of a city

Boston magazine’s “We Will Finish the Race” cover on its May issue is being called perfect. The magazine put a call out for donations of shoes from this year’s race to photograph this iconic image, which taps into the collective grief, resilience and catharsis of a city following the Boston Marathon bombings.

According to an article in Runner’s World, the May issue of the magazine was about to head to the printer on that fateful day, but the publishers were able to obtain an extension to re-shoot their cover in the wake of the tragedy. The magazine received over 150 pairs of shoes in donation and interviewed each of the donors about their experience in the race. 15 of those stories appear in the May issue.

We wanted to do something really special that would honor the runners and everything they had to go through in the events of marathon. We had only a few days to pull something together. Monday night we came up with the concept, and Tuesday began to execute it. It was only made possible by the help of everyone on staff. We reached out to anyone and everyone to collect shoes in less than 48 hours. It was a tremendous effort by everyone—people going out of their way to bring in shoes, interns collecting them, organizing couriers to bring them here. Then we drove them all down to New York on Thursday, where Mitchell Feinberg photographed them, and we closed the magazine while the city was in lockdown on Friday.